Adobe

Yesterday, Nate broke quite a story over on The Digital Reader about Adobe Digital Editions 4.0 sending information in the clear about the e-books you read. It got picked up by The Passive Voice, Ars Technica, GigaOm, TechDirt, Slashdot, BoingBoing, the list goes on and on. Congrats on the scoop, Nate! (Frankly, I’m amazed his blog is still up, given all the traffic this has to be sending his way.) He posted another story today indicating that the bug doesn’t seem to affect prior versions. Effectively, ADE 4.0 gathers up a bunch of information on the books you open...

Want to hear text to speech from free library ebooks on your 50-mile commute? Even if you own an Android machine and the usual OverDrive app can’t do “read-aloud” unless audiobooks count?
Also, what if you haven’t even bought an e-reading gizmo for library use, but want to? Which model to go with?
In those cases and others, the guidance here is for you. Most tips will work even with low-cost, no-name tablets. But let’s pay special attention to the new Kindle Fire HDXes. They are among the top choices if you care more about reading than about tech and can stomach...

Magazines have taken a hit over the years on sales in the marketplace. But we’re talking about physical magazines, the ones where you leaf through actual pages.
Companies have moved toward digital magazines as a way to get consumers back, and even find new ones. According to research by Adobe, which produces the software that most professional print and digital magazines are created with, the outlook is positive.
“The momentum we’re seeing in digital publishing is that publishers are actually able to make money off these magazines,” Lynly Schambers-Lenox, Adobe’s group product marketing manager for digital publishing, told TabTimes. “They are coming...

E-book formatting is a challenge, as I've written about in previous posts. Later this month, Flipick is launching a tool that might make it easier.
From their press release:
Flipick is a new online service that allows book publishers and design shops to produce their own ePub3 compatible eBooks directly from within Adobe InDesign.
This new service is quick, and capable of producing rich, informative and interactive text in an utmost cost-effective manner. Flipick is expected to be popular with publishers creating fixed-layout eBooks such as K-12 and scientific textbooks, storybooks and graphic novels in a format that dynamically adapts to disparate reading...

At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store. One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem...

Marie Lebert's review of the past forty years of ebooks continues over at Project Gutenberg News with eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present. Lebert's post focuses mainly on the timeline of the format's evolution, so I heartily recommend you supplement it with Nate Hoffelder's OMG PDF WTF at The Digital Reader, which highlights some of the format's huge security issues....

How expensive should it be to publish an iPad magazine app? If you said it should cost at least £7003 ($11,537) per year, then you’ll like the deal Adobe is offering with the latest version of its Digital Publishing Suite, the iPad magazine InDesign plugin. Designer Elliot Jay Stocks blogs about Adobe’s pricing scheme, which involves a £3636 platform fee plus a minimum of £3367 set toward the .16 per issue Distribution Service Fee Adobe charges.This is in addition to the cost of the software itself, which doesn’t exactly come cheap, and the 30% fee Apple charges for...

eBookNewser reports that children’s author Mercer Mayer is going to be publishing books through e-publisher FastPencil in 2011. He will be publishing nine titles in 2011, and will be creating new character franchises exclusive to FastPencil in addition to the ones he already has. On ZDNet, James Kendrick has an interesting post in which he puts forward the theory that tablet computers are “impulse purchases”—things that people decide to buy because they look cool rather than out of any specific need for them. As such, he points out, they have to be priced low enough that the...

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)—best known as the organization that forced the World Wrestling Federation to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment—has come up with a clever idea to end paper wasting through accidental or unnecessary printing: a PDF file format that can’t be printed out. The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don't need printing out – then simply save them as WWF. ...

Remember that Mark Twain autobiography, allowed to be published in full only a century after Samuel Clemens’s death? The New York Times reports that it’s turning into a surprise runaway bestseller—the publisher can’t print the books fast enough to keep up with the demand. It originally thought a run of 7,500 copies would be sufficient—after all, who besides scholars would want “a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir”?—but has printed 275,000 so far and is still not meeting holiday season demand. “It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla....

Khoi Vinh, formerly the design director for the New York Times’s website, has a post on his blog, Subtraction.com, looking at the problem with magazine apps for the iPad. (A couple of weeks ago, I covered another article on the same issue for which Vinh was interviewed.) The major problem, Vinh says, is that they are trying to be far too much like printed magazines, and failing to take advantage of advances the iPad makes possible. iPad magazine apps do attract strong advertiser interest, Vinh notes to his surprise. He suspects that it may be an indicator of a...

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has a post considering the possible copyright status of the new three-volume Mark Twain autobiography that is being published in its entirety and as Twain originally intended for the first time, a century after his death. Masnick finds the overall copyright claim that the Mark Twain foundation puts on it to be misleading, because the portions of it that have never before been published, as well as the portions that were published before 1923 and any portions published between 1923 and 1963 on which copyright was not renewed, ought to be in the public...